Alum Jamaal May’s (poetry, ’11) collection The Big Book of Exit Strategies was released by Alice James books in April.

Alum Robin Black’s (fiction, ’05) new book Crash Course: Essays from Where Writing and Life Collide was published by Engine Books in April.

Alum Chiyuma Elliott (poetry, ’10)’s collection California Winter League has been released by Unicorn Press.

Alum Karen Olsson’s (fiction, ’05)  novel All the Houses has been released by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

Alum Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s (poetry, ’11) new collection FUEGO was published by St Julian Press in March.

All the News I Need by alum Joan Frank (fiction, ’96) won the 2016 Juniper Prize for Fiction, a literary prize series coordinated by the University of Massachusetts Press. The novel is slated for publication in 2017.

Alum Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (poetry, ’15) won the 2016 Writers @ Work Poetry Fellowship.

Faculty member Brooks Haxton’s poem “The Arctic Vortex at Snooks Pond, 2014”  was published in Ploughshares’ Spring 2016 issue.

Alum Kate Murr (poetry, ’16) was a finalist for the 2016 Tupelo Sunken Garden Chapbook Award.

Faculty member Dominic Smith‘s new novel The Last Painting of Sara De Vos is receiving fantastic reviews from a number of outlets, including the New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, and the Boston Globe: “Written in prose so clear that we absorb its images as if by mind meld, ‘The Last Painting’ is gorgeous storytelling: wry, playful, and utterly alive, with an almost tactile awareness of the emotional contours of the human heart.”

Alum Nan Cuba (fiction, ’89) won a prestigious Dobie Paisano Fellowship (previous recipients include Sandra Cisneros and Stephen Harrigan) and will live for six months (February-August 2016) on the 250-acre, J. Frank Dobie ranch outside of Austin, where she will work on a “tragicomic novel in the vein of a Coen brothers movie.”

Bastards of the Reagan Era by alum Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) won the 2016 PEN/New England Award, selected by Mark Doty, who said of the collection: “These poems of sorrow and slow-burning fury hold, at their core, the deepest love for the erased and the discarded. Betts has written an indelible lament for a generation, a necessary book for this American moment.”

Alum Brian Blanchfield (poetry, ’99) is a 2016 Whiting Award winner for non-fiction and has his first book of prose, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, out from Nightboat Books this month. The collection includes 24 single-subject essays, “part cultural studies, part (dicey) autobiography.” From the Whiting Award citation: “The quiet but searing vulnerability in Brian Blanchfield’s writing is as wide and trembling as the wingspan of his otherness. He writes with a beguiling sagaciousness that made me bow my head so many times that I lost count.”

The short story “Heishe” by alum Nancy Allen (fiction, ’12) appears in StoryQuarterly 49, The Literary Magazine of Rutgers University-Camden.

A short story titled “Adiós and Adiós,” by alum Patricia Grace King (fiction, ’13) has recently been published in the Winter 2015 issue of The Gettysburg Review.

Two poems from alum Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13) appear in the March/April issue of Women’s Review of Books and are accompanied by a post in Women = Books, the Women’s Review of Books blog.

Faculty member Dominic Smith’s novel The Last Painting of Sara de Vos will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.

Alum Rebecca Foust’s (poetry, ’10) poem “Iconostatis” won the North American Review’s 2016 James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Jane Hirshfield (http://northamericanreview.org/hearst-prize/), and her short story “Something Blue” won the American Literary Review’s 2015 Creative Writing Award for Fiction judged by Garth Greenwell (http://www.americanliteraryreview.com/).

Faculty member Jennifer Grotz’s collection Window Left Open was released in February by Graywolf Press.

Alum Greg Pierce’s (fiction, ’12) latest play Her Requiem started previews earlier this month at the Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater in New York City. The play will open on Feb. 22. Full information is available here: http://www.lct.org/shows/her-requiem/.

A collection of poems by late faculty member Larry Levis titled The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems was released by Graywolf Press in January.

Faculty member C. Dale Young’s collection The Halo will be released by Four Way Books in March.

Faculty member Christopher Castellani’s book The Art of Perspective was released in January by Graywolf Press.

Alum David Mills (poetry, ’16) has been awarded a New Work Grant by the Queens Council on the Arts, supporting the creation of new work by Queens artists in all disciplines. More information is available here:  http://www.queenscouncilarts.org/qaf-2016-awardees.

NPR’s Fresh Air conducted an interview with alum Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) about his collection Bastards of the Reagan Era. You can listen to the audio and read highlights online HERE.

Bastards of the Reagan Era has been longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, as has Chord by faculty member Rick Barot.

Alum Marta Rose (fiction, ’15) and faculty member Laura van den Berg appears at Fiction Writers Review:

I first noticed Laura van den Berg sitting a few seats ahead of me on an airplane en route to Asheville, North Carolina, though I had no idea who she was then. I had recently sent my family on their own summer adventures—my eleven-year-old son was at sleep away camp, my seventeen-year-old daughter was taking a course in urban studies in Chicago, my wife was with friends at the shore—and I was thrilled to be on my way to a ten-day writing residency as a fiction student in the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers. The young woman seated a few rows ahead of me, however, looked anything but thrilled; in fact, I first noticed her because she was visibly shaken by the turbulence on our short flight from Charlotte to Asheville, gripping the arms of her seat with each bump, her eyes seeking the flight attendants for reassurance each time the small airplane jerked and bounced. I wanted to give her a reassuring smile, but I could never seem to catch her eye.

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